Sorry for the hiatus, so let's pick up where we left off...
Swordmaker: "You just continue to fail to grasp the cube-square law. . . Notice it is a 'law.' "
A little googling turns up some sources for all this laughable nonsense:
The Paradox of Large Dinosaurs (The New Science) -- 2010, 17 pages, Kindle: $3.
Galileo's Square-Cube Law (The New Science) -- 2010, 22 pages Kindle: $3.
The Science of Flight and the Paradox of Flying Pterosaurs (The New Science) -- 2010, 36 pages, Kindle: $3.
An appropriate & detailed response to Esker's sauropod arguments is this:
Biology of the Sauropod Dinosaurs: Understanding the Life of Giants (Life of the Past) -- 2011, 348 pages, Kindle: $38
For Esker's Pterosaur arguments, we can begin here:
Pterosaurs: Natural History, Evolution, Anatomy -- 2013, 304 pages, Kindle $19
Alamo-Girl, in post #113 above, Swordmaker implies that the largest flying birds today -- "Albatross with an up to 11 foot wingspan and weigh only 30 lbs" -- are the largest birds which can fly.
In response I noted that the Kori Bustard's nine-foot wing span can lift its 44 pounds off the ground.
But even more important to flight is not the wing-span alone versus bird-weight.
Rather, it's the wing-load -- pounds per square foot of wing, and the rule of thumb for birds is: 5 lbs per square foot of wing.
So, if we take the largest bird which ever lived, Argentavis, with max 26 foot wings lifting 176 lbs.
Those wings needed to be less than 1.5 feet wide to produce the 5 lbs/sq foot required for flight:
There is more to be responded to here, and I will return to it later, but let's end now with this idea:
Nobody seriously objects to what you decide is "real" or "not-real" in your own life.
For example, if you decide that Tolkien's Hobbits are "real" creatures that live in Hobbit-holes, or if you believe in a "galaxy long ago and far away" where young Skywalker could "feeeel the force" -- I say all well and good, especially since those are generally moral, uplifting stories.
But, but, but... if you pretend such beliefs have something to do with "science", now you are trespassing onto posted land, and there you must respect the rights of the owners: real scientists.
Swordmaker: "They had to drop the neck to parallel to the ground, again because of the issues brought up by the people YOU ARE DENIGRATING, trying any way possible to limit the damage and find answers"
All three of Esker's short books were published in 2010, and all of the responses I've listed here came subsequently.
But, exactly how much "credit" Esker deserves for stimulating real science is impossible to say.
What's the term for that logical fallacy?
"Post hoc ergo propter hoc".
http://www.krugerpark.co.za/africa_kori_bustard.html
"They are ground dwellers, hence the name bustard, meaning birds that walk. They fly only when necessary because of their weight. It is even appearing that the Kori Bustards may become categorized as the few large flightless birds like ostriches and emus, which means they may be returning to an ancient ancestral form, since they, and the other cranes, are descendants of large flightless predators."
Basically, Bustards fly about as well as chickens do and are evidence that Adrian Desmond's note ("Hot blooded dinosaurs") about calculations as to flying maximums was correct:
"It would be a grave understatement to say that, as a flying creature, Pteranodon was large. Indeed, there were sound reasons for believing that it was the largest animal that ever could become airborne. With each increase in size, and therefore also weight, a flying animal needs a concomitant increase in power (to beat the wings in a flapper and to hold and maneuver them in a glider), but power is supplied by muscles which themselves add still more weight to the structure.-- The larger a flyer becomes the disproportionately weightier it grows by the addition of its own power supply. There comes a point when the weight is just too great to permit the machine to remain airborne. Calculations bearing on size and power suggested that the maximum weight that a flying vertebrate can attain is about 50 lb.: Pteranodon and its slightly larger but lesser known Jordanian ally Titanopteryx were therefore thought to be the largest flying animals."
In the case of the chicken, you have a member of the same family as pheasants which started off as a 1.5 lb. jungle fowl and was then bred into a 6 lb. meat animal but still has only the 1.5 lb bird's wings. The square/cube problem has done the same thing for the bustard, which can fly with difficulty for short distances, but that's it, i.e. it would be a mistake to call a bustard a flying bird.
The argument that bustards prove that a teratorn or a Texas pterosaur could fly in our world is idiotic.
The calculations Desmond mentions were perfectly good. Large pterosaurs could not possibly fly in our present world but they did in fact fly (you can't live by dragging 50' wings around). The only reasonable and rational analysis is that they did not experience gravity as we do.
David Esker proposes that dinosaurs were able to grow so large because the atmosphere was many times more dense—not that gravity was in someway attenuated—dense enough that it was the equivalent of "swimming through water" which supported their bodies.